Thank you, Chairman Feinstein, Vice Chairman Chambliss, distinguished members of the Committee for inviting us to present the 2012 Worldwide Threat Assessment.
These remarks and our Statement for the Record reflect the collective insights of the extraordinary men and women of the United States Intelligence Community, whom it is our privilege and honor to lead. And on their behalf, I would thank you both for your acknowledgment and recognition of the great work that these men and women do, all over the world, day in and day out, in many cases at some hazard.
I won’t attempt to cover the full scope of worldwide threats in these brief oral remarks, so I’d like to highlight just some of the issues that we identified for the coming year.
Never has there been, in my almost 49-year career in intelligence, a more complex and interdependent array of challenges than that we face today. Capabilities, technologies, know-how, communications, and environmental forces aren’t confined by borders, and can trigger transnational disruptions with astonishing speed, as we have seen.
Never before has the Intelligence Community been called upon to master such complexity on so many issues in such a resource-constrained environment. We’re rising to the challenge by continuing to integrate the Intelligence Community, as you’ve both alluded, taking advantage of new technologies, implementing new efficiencies, and, as always, simply working hard. But candidly, maintaining the world’s premier intelligence enterprise in the face of shrinking budgets will be difficult. We’ll be accepting and managing risk, more so than we’ve had to do in the last decade.
